In The News: Special Collections and Archives

Saturday marks two years since a gunman opened fire at UNLV, killing three professors and injuring a fourth. The shooting happened December 6, 2023. Police say the gunman came to campus heavily armed and opened fire at Beam Hall, hitting four professors. Three of them died. Two Metro Police officers gave medical assistance to the fourth victim in the middle of the active scene. Those officers were later honored for saving his life.

Two years after the tragic shooting that killed three professors on UNLV’s campus, ways to honor the victims’ memory are beginning to take shape.

Two years after a gunman killed three UNLV professors and seriously injured another, the college says it has plans to construct a healing garden that memorializes the tragedy.

Human remains unearthed in a desert area outside Henderson more than half a century ago have been identified as those of a Canadian woman who may have been an acquaintance of a mob-linked Las Vegas union leader and convicted killer, police announced. During the investigation of Just’s disappearance, Metro said Friday, several reports suggested she was an acquaintance of Thomas Hanley, who according to UNLV archives was a Las Vegas union leader with ties to organized crime families in the Midwest. A deputy district attorney had also accused of Hanley of being responsible for Just’s killing, according to previous Las Vegas Review-Journal coverage.
Human remains, found in the desert near Las Vegas 50 years ago, have been identified as a Canadian woman who may have been killed by the mob. The remains belonged to Anna Sylvia Just, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department announced Friday, after the identification was made using DNA provided by her sister.

Using DNA samples, human remains found in the desert south of Las Vegas more than 50 years ago have been identified as a missing Canadian woman who may have been the victim of a mob hit. During the investigation, reports suggested Just was an acquaintance of Thomas Hanley, the former head of the American Federation of Casino and Gaming Employees and the Gaming and Office Employee Union. Hanley had known ties to organized crime in Las Vegas and the Midwest, according to the UNLV Special Collections and Archives. He was accused of killing Ralph Alsup, of Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 525, in 1966, but the charges against Hanley were dropped.
On Sept. 12, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh unveiled a powerful and historic tribute — a stunning exhibition honoring 60 Black photojournalists from across the nation. Among those featured in this visually compelling space was our very own Clinton Wright, veteran photojournalist of The Voice Newspaper, whose images of Las Vegas’s Black community have captured decades of untold stories.

Taylor Swift’s 12th studio album The Life of a Showgirl pays homage to the rip-roaring lifestyle of showgirls. TIME called up showgirls who have performed in Las Vegas, the longtime capital of showgirl shows in the U.S., to see how they think the album captured the life of a showgirl and what the life of a showgirl is really like.

Have questions or want to learn more about the history of Las Vegas? There is no better place to start than the Special Collections and Archives Department at UNLV.

When you think of "Old Vegas," the icons that probably come to mind are names like Elvis, Sinatra and Wayne Newton. However, there were many Asian American and Pacific Islander performers then, too, who played an integral role in shaping entertainment on the Las Vegas Strip in the mid to late 1900s.
Las Vegas has always been the epitome of glitz and excess, but there was a time when it became the birthplace of the greatest entertainment shows inspired by the famous dancers of the Folies Bergère in Paris.
A group of University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) students have painstakingly preserved a photographer’s archive by digitizing it and making it available online to anyone. Six students worked on the project over the course of two to preserve the work of Clinton Wright, a press photographer who documented Black life in the Westside neighborhood of Las Vegas in the 1960s.